Reading outdated documentation for days. Chasing colleagues for missing information. Trying to run scripts that are no longer maintained. Waiting a week for IT to provide access to certificates and secrets. Requesting database dumps because seeding scripts are out of sync. Finally merging your first contribution after a month - these are common frustrations that new developers face when joining a team, experiences I’ve both witnessed and lived through.

Bringing a new developer up to speed is a significant investment. Companies lose billions annually due to inefficient onboarding and delayed productivity. Each day a developer spends wrestling with setup instead of contributing meaningful code is a direct cost to the business. The longer it takes to understand the codebase, configure the development environment, and align with team processes, the higher the cost becomes. Streamlining developer onboarding is not just about improving the experience but is also a critical factor in controlling costs and maximizing return on investment for new hires. That’s where .NET Aspire comes in.

.NET Aspire offers a refreshing new approach to developer onboarding

.NET Aspire transforms the developer onboarding experience through its innovative orchestration model. By providing a declarative approach to service configuration and infrastructure dependencies, teams can model their entire development environment setup using real code - no YAML involved. A new developer needs only to clone the repository and start the Aspire host project which handles everything.

// Create a distributed application builder given the command line arguments.
var builder = DistributedApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

// Add a Redis server to the application.
var cache = builder.AddRedis("cache");

// Add the frontend project to the application and configure it to use the 
// Redis server, defined as a referenced dependency.
builder.AddProject<Projects.MyFrontend>("frontend")
       .WithReference(cache)
       .WaitFor(cache);

Unlike traditional infrastructure-as-code files buried in deployment folders, .NET Aspire configuration lives directly in the project’s source code. Since team members interact with this configuration daily, issues are resolved promptly.

When infrastructure evolve - such as adding a new Node.js backend or message queue - developers simply update the Aspire host project, commit the changes, and everyone receives the updates on their next pull. This tight feedback loop significantly reduces configuration drift and ensures consistent environments across the team.

This code sample might be too simplistic to convince you, so let’s move on to something more complex.

.NET Aspire’s capabilities at scale

The eShopSupport reference application demonstrates .NET Aspire’s capabilities in a production-like distributed system. This project combines multiple .NET backend and frontend applications with Python services, various data stores, message queues, and Large Language Models (LLMs).

Generative AI can be found everywhere in this project. When I discovered it, I was truly amazed by the variety of technologies and clever tricks. It’s a great reminder that .NET Aspire isn’t just built for .NET - it can run any kind of application.

Even though I was more of a beginner with LLMs in apps and running them locally, I was able to get the whole thing up and running in just a few minutes. Moreover, it came with AI-generated seed data, enabling me to start playing with the app immediately. It felt immensely satisfying.

What else to expect from .NET Aspire

The onboarding experience isn’t the only area where .NET Aspire shines. It also has a best-in-class OpenTelemetry dashboard, making it essential to understand what’s happening in your application in real time. Developers often lack formal education on observability, and when they do learn about it, it’s usually limited to cloud environments. .NET Aspire brings these capabilities to the local development environment, lowering the barrier to entry for understanding and debugging distributed applications.

Integration testing is another underappreciated feature of .NET Aspire. Since it orchestrates your entire application, you can easily write integration tests that spin up the complete environment and run your tests against it.

.NET Aspire isn’t your typical rigid, YAML-based CLI tool. You interact with it using code, and it’s highly extensible. There’s so much you can do with it - I’ve personally pushed its boundaries at work. Who knows what innovative features the .NET team will introduce next? I have some ideas, but that’s for another post.

Photo by This_is_Engineering on pixabay.com